Reddit user ohlawlz asked:
People of reddit who have accidentally showed NSFW things from your computer during important presentations, what is your story?
Here were some of those stories.
"Motivational"
"I was being presented to rather than presenting. My boss called our team in for a morning review, he was a bit like David Brent/Michael Scott so at the end of the meeting he liked to show "motivational videos".
"This one time he goes on YouTube and as he starts typing his laptop freezes with only the letter a in the search bar (he was looking for the Any Given Sunday speech), as I'm sure you know when you start typing YouTube will make suggestions or show previous searches. So on the screen the first result under the "a" was "Asian lesbian massage".
"Everybody saw. Nobody said a word. Before his laptop had unfrozen he closed it up and said the video could wait until next time."
"It was never mentioned around him again but the rest of us laughed about it for weeks."
"I was a university 'professor' (I was a grad student filling the part as cheap labour)."
"There was a time when QuickTime on the Mac would open the last video you were watching. I don't know if it was a feature or what, or is still an option, I have no clue. But I didn't realize it somehow. I think I'd always just double clicked my new video file and it opened."
"Well, I was sharing my screen giving a lecture and wanted to show a video clip. I clicked QuickTime icon at the bottom. Window opens and it's paused on a clip of my girlfriend of the time in a pretty compromising position."
"As soon as I saw it I ripped the power plug from my computer.... but it was a laptop."
"As soon as I'd realized that wasn't going to work I pulled the VGA adaptor thing out of the side."
"I said, "Oh sorry, technical problems." and got a ton of laughs."
"I closed that thing down and launched the right video, then plugged everything back in and went on like it never happened."
"After the class one of the kids said, "You're hilarious."
"Thankfully, they are 'adults' when they are that age, and no one ever reported it or said anything as far as I know."
"I used to work for a point of sale systems company, my coworkers and I would mess with each others demo accounts, put in very inappropriate Easter eggs etc.. which is ok because we weren't in customer facing positions."
"All of a sudden I get asked by my boss to go on site to a very important customer to train them and demo the system. I go there, quite a formal setting, the customer sets me up with a projector. About 7 people in this meeting. I start showing everything, everything is fine until I show a lesser known function of the system (it makes a picture pop up of a food item or a product or whatever)."
"My favourite jerk coworker had changed all those pictures to some very explicit gay adult videos. With a didgeridoo."
"My immediate reaction was to just start laughing, luckily the other people started laughing too and I said "well... As you can see, you can add any picture you want to this function, so if you're selling didgeridoos..."
"Back at the office everyone thought it was hilarious, luckily the customer thought so too and is still with our company"
Inadvertent Porn
"Old story, but that context is important for understanding the 'why'. I was interning at an small US ad agency in the early days of the internet. Boss/principal wanted me to do some internet research on something mundane - US automobile market share, methinks. He was going to be out of the office for a couple hours and I could use his desktop computer to do it, as interns back then had no computer to call their own."
"This is pre-google when porn companies would manipulate keywords to show up in your Yahoo search results no matter what, so I search for 'automobile market share' or whatever and get a list of links. The whole first page of the list is porn sites, and my curiosity gets the better of me. I click on a few just trying to understand what they could possibly have to do with automobile market share, poking around the metadata etc, and yes of course just a bit titillated as internet porn was a new concept at the time."
"However, I am in someone important's office, door open, etc, so I quickly shut it down without any self-service and continue the struggle to complete the task at hand, leaving the browser window open with the data I found to satisfy his question."
"Boss gets back and quickly calls me into his office, asking basically "what's the meaning of this?" Well, unbeknownst to me, pop-unders had just been invented, so I unknowingly left a dozen small browser windows full of adult videos ads sitting open under the main window with the research in it. That was a seriously awkward conversation, trying to explain that yes, I did click on some things, but honestly wasn't being inappropriate and was more just baffled and confused. Even worse, the data I had found was pretty much useless, so he essentially thought the intern had just been inappropriate in his office the last 2 hours instead of doing the requested task."
My Thesis Defense
"So I wasn't the one presenting, but I was involved in the situation. I my 20s, one of my college friends was in a slump with the ladies (like 7 years w/ no dates). He was in graduate school for art and I was out of college and working. He sent a text out late at night on a thursday with news that he had gone on a date and hooked up with a woman."
"I didn't get the text since I was asleep, and when I saw it in the morning at work, I hopped onto AOL IM (This was like 15 years ago) to congratulate him. He was away, so I sent a TON of messages like "Yeah dude, good job! What's her name? What does she look liked? What did you guys do?" and emojis and meme pictures of cartoons having sex etc etc."
"After about 10 mins, he signed off without responding and was offline the rest of the day. I didn't think anything of it and then I got a call from him at like 8pm all upset. Apparently, when I IMed him, he was doing his thesis defense and he had his laptop plugged into the projector at the back of the room and only had the little slide advancer tool. So when I IMed him, they kept popping up on screen and he'd have to stop talking until they went away or I sent another message."
"Finally, after a long enough time that he realized I was not going to stop IMing him, he paused his presentation and ran to the back of the room to log out. He was really mad, but mainly out of embarrassment. My IMs actually helped him out because most of his thesis questions ended up being about the girl and his dating slump and not hard questions on his work."
"So he was mad that it happened, but also relieved that his thesis was over. . ."
Not The Christmas Card I Expected
"I was running a training class offshore we wrapped for a break and I decide to check my personal email. Didn't think to turn off the projector cause everyone was exiting the room, and just didn't think about it. I was expecting an email from my mom maybe, was really just going to quick scan the headers to make sure all my bill pays had processed. Any sales. I see an email from my bestie. Header says we miss you here's you xmas card. This should be sweet so I click. And for a brief second all my friends were on the projector naked posing in front of a xmas tree wearing santa hats. I'm sure a few of the trainees saw but no one said anything."
Hot Mic
"Idk if this qualifies. When I was a kid I went to a friends Bar Mitzvah. Probably 150 so people are attending. Halfway through the service there is a time where everyone prays quietly to themselves. At this point in the service its damn near silent in the room except for some quiet muttering. At that point the Rabbi decided to go to the bathroom. He also didn't turn off the lavalier mic on his lapel and we heard him peeing, farting, and saying "well g*ddamn" and yawning. At first no one knew what the sound was, and then everyone figured out at once. By the time we all knew what we were listening to it was pretty much over. I did feel awful for him when he walked back out. I'm sure someone said something at some point but I never saw it."
Whoopsie!
"I was in Iraq. Part of my job was to publish this report that was sent out to basically every unit in Iraq. My coworkers and I had got into the habit of messing with each other on our shifts and leaving random NSFW things on the screen for the next shift to find. One of my coworkers changed the title page of this report to say "F*** This Report." I didn't catch the change until after it was already sent out to high ranking officers throughout Iraq. Almost instantly I was bombarded by equal comments of 'WTF' and 'thats hilarious.' Thankfully, our commander fell into the 'that's hilarious' category, so we didn't catch too much flack for it, but I am sure that ominous feeling I had taken at least a few years off my life."
"It wasn't a presentation but a funny story anyways. In college we where working laptops in lab and I left mine unlocked when I went to the washroom."
"When i came back the room was silent because everyone was working. Until I get a msn message and my computer screamed at top volume "HEY EVERYONE i'M LOOKING AT GAY ADULT VIDEOS OVER HERE"
"My usually stoic teacher just calmly said "Mr. Mackey can you please do that on your own time."
The 90s Came Back
"I was talking with someone about an old porn site from the 90's, I googled it to see if it still existed. Realized that it did, we had a good laugh, and forgot about the conversation."
"A couple weeks later I was in class and my professor's laptop dies, I offer mine up so she can finish her presentation (which included googling reference images). As soon as she typed in the word "the".. It auto filled to the aforementioned porn site. I dont think she caught it but there's no way out of a room full of people that no one else did. I was mortified, and learned the valuable lesson of not googling weird stuff outside of incognito."
Okay, we'll forever have fear about presenting to coworkers now!
Do you have similar experiences? Let us know in the comments below.